Frequently Asked Questions

WHAT IS RED LIGHT PROPERTIES?
It’s a digital comic series by Dan Goldman (me) about a family-owned real estate agency on Miami Beach that exorcises and sells “previously-haunted” homes. The firm’s still-kinda-married owners Jude and Cecilia Tobin are always teetering over the edge of bankruptcy and divorce, making Cecilia push Jude to work harder… which means taking more drugs to enter the spirit world, where he becomes less and less a part of his family’s lives.

SOUNDS DOPE! WHERE CAN I READ IT?RED LIGHT PROPERTIES is available via Comixology on practically any computing device from Monkeybrain Comics, and all issues are just $0.99 cents.

WHO ARE THESE OTHER WEIRD PEOPLE IN THE STORY?
In the menu at the top right is a link to CHARACTERS with a quick explanation of the main characters in the series, in case you stepped away for a while and forgot.

AND WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?
I’m the one who writes and draws the comic, codes the site, tweets the tweets. I do it all in RLP, have been for the last three years. I’ve written and drawn lots of other comics, written prose and recently videogames. More about me is waiting for you to read right here.

SO, HOW DO YOU MAKE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL COMIC?
This video interview done by the RADAR series before the series launched in 2010 lets me talk about my inspiration and workflow in under 5mins, even though my process has evolved ALOT over the last three years:

YO DAN, HOW’D YOU COME UP WITH THIS CRAZY SCENARIO?
The thing was, I’d spent the last seven-odd years creating several “timely!”“political!”“relevant!” graphic novels… and in the end I just didn’t care enough about the Great Beast to circle around and fling another 200pg arrow at its black heart again. To me, politics is a low-level manifestation of a greater humanist struggle to better, ugly instead of sublime, and in the end I was kneeling down to the sewer grating shoveling fuel into something I didn’t fucking believe in anymore.

This time out, I wanted to reach for the stars, do a series about finding the sublime in the gutter, the love in a world of hate, the meaning of life and death from the weird spaces in between. I’d been holding on this series called RED LIGHT PROPERTIES since I wrote the first draft in 2001, but I was a different Dan Goldman then and it’s grown up a lot along with me:

Back in 2001, I was living in this cheap-ass house on a not-yet-gentrified street in Brooklyn with my brother, where we’d built a creative space upstairs to dream up many wonderful comic ideas together. There was another resident though; I could feel him in the twilight hours when I was sliding towards sleep, lurking around and watching. After a few months of catching someone out of the corner of my eye from the drafting table, I asked some “lifers” on our street about our house’s previous residents. Annette-from-a-few-doors-down told me that back in the ’80s there was an artist couple there, and that Charlie, a middle-aged painter, died in the upstairs bedroom (mine), and his wife moved out shortly after.

Charlie’s name immediately sank into my subconscious like an anchor. A few weeks later, I was snoring on my futon when Charlie leaned into my head and introduced himself properly with a “hello” that came from between my eyes and sounded as though it was played through blown speakers/eardrums. I sat up bolt-upright; of course the room was empty, but my sweat was cold. I went downstairs, heart racing, to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water from the kitchen sink… and by the time the water reached my stomach, there was something else there. A cast of characters, years of history, echoes of terrible things in the walls of buildings, and a realty office named RED LIGHT PROPERTIES.

WHAT IS THAT STUFF JUDE IS SMOKING THAT LETS HIM SEE GHOSTS… AND DO YOU SELL IT IN YOUR ONLNE STORE?
Jude’s connection with Dr. Amanda Hagen gives him the best imported quasi-legal hallucinogens money can buy. Only a daily basis, he smokes/drinks/snuffs a tailor-made mixture of salvia divinorum, blue lotus, ibogaine and other substances that Amanda is constantly tweaking to maximize his ability to pass through the Membrane between life and death. In fact, the unfashionable orange fanny pack his belly hangs over is a veritable Bat-utility belt of hallucinogenic tools for entering the spirit world. Sadly, I cannot offer any of Jude’s treats from my online store as both he and Dr. Amanda are completely fictional.

WHY DOES THIS TAKE PLACE IN MIAMI?
Because I grew up there in that neon-lit pastel-painted sunshine, neon, surrounded by death. Old people are constantly dropping dead in restaurants and malls, car crashes night and day, drug overdoses and murders and gangland slayings. It’s a (Latin) American city, and it’s mine. It’s the place my brain went dreaming up all of this, and there’s no signs of stopping yet.